ABSTRACT
The emotional impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing social restrictions has been profound, with widespread negative effects on mental health. We made use of the natural language processing and large-scale Twitter data to explore this in depth, identifying emotions in COVID-19 news content and user reactions to it, and how these evolved over the course of the pandemic. We focused on major UK news channels, constructing a dataset of COVID-related news tweets (tweets from news organisations) and user comments made in response to these, covering Jan 2020 to April 2021. Natural language processing was used to analyse topics and levels of anger, joy, optimism, and sadness. Overall, sadness was the most prevalent emotion in the news tweets, but this was seen to decline over the timeframe under study. In contrast, amongst user tweets, anger was the overall most prevalent emotion. Time epochs were defined according to the time course of the UK social restrictions, and some interesting effects emerged regarding these. Further, correlation analysis revealed significant positive correlations between the emotions in the news tweets and the emotions expressed amongst the user tweets made in response, across all channels studied. Results provide unique insight onto how the dominant emotions present in UK news and user tweets evolved as the pandemic unfolded. Correspondence between news and user tweet emotional content highlights the potential emotional effect of online news on users and points to strategies to combat the negative mental health impact of the pandemic. © 2023 Simon L. Evans et al.
ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: In the COVID-19 pandemic, the concern about mask-harmful effects disturbed mask-adherence. However, it is not certain whether the masks cause cardiopulmonary overload. OBJECTIVE: To investigate the physiological and disturbing effects of surgical face masks during exercise. METHOD: The study was conducted in a tertiary hospital with 100 healthy volunteers between September 2020 and January 2021. Individuals with impaired walking, cardiopulmonary disease, and smoking were not included in the study. Initially, respiratory rate (RR), heart rate (HR), oxygen saturation (SpO2), end-tidal carbon dioxide (EtCO2) were measured. Participants underwent 6-minute walking test (6MWT) with and without surgical masks. Mask-discomfort questionnaire was applied before and after 6 MWT with the mask. RESULTS: Surgical masks during 6 MWTs significantly increased HR, RR, and EtCO2 levels (p<0.001). Walking distance (p<0.001) and SpO2 level (p=0.002) were significantly decreased with mask. In Mask-Discomfort Questionnaire, humidity, temperature, resistance, salinity, odor, fatigue (p<0.001), and itching (p=0.001) scores significantly increased after 6MWT with mask. CONCLUSION: In healthy volunteers, HR, RR, EtCO2 were increased, and SpO2 and walking distance were decreased in the short-term, light exercise performed with the surgical mask. Findings support the concern that masks may cause cardiopulmonary overload (Tab. 3, Fig. 1, Ref. 17). Text in PDF www.elis.sk Keywords: COVID-19, masks, physiology, psychological side effects, questionnaire.
Subject(s)
COVID-19 , Humans , Masks , Pandemics , SARS-CoV-2 , WalkingABSTRACT
Purpose: The aim of this study was to evaluate the relationship between the service style of Community Mental Health Centers (CMHC) and anxiety levels in patients with schizophrenia in the Covid-19 pandemic. Materials and Methods: Twenty-six patients with schizophrenia in remission between the ages of 22-68, who regularly attended the Erzurum Regional Training and Research Hospital TRSM, were included in the study. A form was used to evaluate the sociodemographic characteristics of the patients. The Clinical Global Impression Scale (CGI) and State and Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI), which were applied to the patients before the pandemic, were administered for the second time during the period when the post-pandemic interviews were minimized, and administered for the third time, when regular face-to-face meetings resumed. Results: The highest STAI scores were found in the second interview and the lowest in the first interview. The scores in all 3 interviews are statistically significantly different from each other. Although the CGI values seem to be statistically significantly different from each other in all 3 interviews;this difference was not found statistically significant in post-hoc analysis. Conclusion: The results we have obtained from our study show that the Covid-19 pandemic may have negative effects on the psychological state of schizophrenia patients, and community mental health services can contribute to reducing this effect.